Somebody in London is stopped and searched every three minutes, according to new figures obtained by BBC London.
The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.
I find it hard to see how anyone could be particularly shocked by these statistics. It seems little more than a truism to observe that, particularly in the absence of any substantive external oversight or institutional constraints, granting police powers like this will invariably lead to mission creep. Even on the most mundane day-to-day level, it’s obvious that faced with a choice about what powers to utilise – whether on the part of individual officers or higher up the chain of command – the police will, over time, choose to utilise terror laws that increase the scope of their powers when there’s no real counter-incentive to doing so. Why bother establishing grounds for suspicion when you can simply invoke section 44? Likewise, as we can see from the massive increase year-on-year, the normalisation of these procedures in turn makes them more likely as they become a mundane part of the institutional culture, at least within London.
Again rather surprisingly the BBC reports that the “success rate” is just over 0.035%, amounting to 65 arrests - and no charges - for terror offenses. Of course to criticise their use in terms of a ‘low success rate’ is profoundly ideological, assuming as it does that (a) the intentions underlying are unambiguouslyy ‘to catch terrorists’ rather than also being, say, to inculcate a politically expedient climate of fear in the capital (b) that there is no problem in principle with the laws or their use but rather simply with their effectiveness. Since the G20 sections of the media have started to catch up to the fact, albeit in a largely inadequate and superficial way, that the culture and practice of policing in this country has taken a deeply worrying turn in the past decade, as long-standing trends towards the politicisation and pseudo-rationalisation of policing have been exasperated by New Labour’s paranoid centralism and their cynical cultivation of an ‘anti-terror climate’. Yet the media have been hugely complicit in these worrying trends, as vacuous ideological fault lines produce trivial debates about ‘bad apples’ and ‘police effectiveness’, which render the structural significance of these changes far more opaque than they would otherwise be. How should we understand these changes in police culture and practice in terms of the wider institutional and ideological restructuring of the British state into the captain of UK PLC, negotiating the choppy seas of our ‘globalized’ world?
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